I just found out my cousin, Bobby, is coming to town. I haven’t seen my affable cousin in at least 10 years, maybe longer. He and his wife, Mary, live in upstate New York and we haven’t been over that way in a long time.

Bobby is called Bobby for the same reason I was called Donny. His father was Bob and mine was Don so we got assigned our diminutive sobriquets.

Between the ages of 9 and 14, Bobby and I lived about six miles from each other, he in Fayetteville, New York and I in Chittenango. Both towns are bedroom communities for Syracuse but Fayetteville is a bit nearer the city and, as you can probably infer from the name, is the flashier of the two.

“Flashy” has never been used to describe Chittenango. Fayetteville exuded sort of a country-posh, “New Englandy” sort of ambiance, whereas the village of Chittenango is “farmy” and was, at least back when we lived there, kind of a hick town. The photo on the official “Hello from Chittenango” postcard, sold in Perrone’s Drugs, featured a shot of the main drag . . . with a manure-spreader in the foreground. We lived in a housing tract a mile west of the village limit but always told people that we lived in Mycena, which was a microscopic hamlet a couple miles to the east.

At some point, the Chittenango town fathers discovered that L. Frank Baum, the creator of the “Wizard of Oz” books had been born there and launched into a veritable L. Frank Baum frenzy. When Deb, and I visited back around 2001, the town was chock-a-block with Oz references, including a long section of Yellow Brick Road. I never heard it mentioned when we lived there.

Sadly, we discovered that a restaurant which had been a destination eatery since the early 1930s, was no longer in business. Just as Zender’s in Frankenmuth, is known for its chicken dinners, this place specialized in . . . ham. It was called (I’m not kidding) “The Ham That Am Ham,” but everybody slurred it into “Ham-the-Damn-Ham.”

Oh, man, I’m two-thirds of the way through this screed and we’ve lost all track of Bobby. I’ll save a more extensive history of Chittenango till next week.

Bobby and I were born only a couple months apart. I have no memory of our first encounter as 3-year-olds but my mother tells me that we got on well enough other than he occasionally drove me to distraction by his inability to properly pronounce the word “duck.”.

“Guck,” he would bubble, happily pointing to one in a picture book. “It’s duuuuuck!” I would tell him over and over. He eventually figured it out because years later, when we were teenagers, I’m pretty sure I heard him say “duck” quite plainly.

Bobby and I were both fishing freaks from an early age. My cousin fished with our grandfather, himself or with me. I fished with my father, by myself or with him. When I’m stymied on the river today, I still warble the Bobby composition he used to sing when we were kids: “Oh, come out little trout and I’ll give you some food.”

The farm streams we fished were only three or four feet wide but had deeply undercut banks that harbored large fish. I never saw him do this but Bobby swore he could reach under the bank and actually grab a sleeping trout. Not me, boy. Having seen snapping turtles the size of wash tubs that could chomp a broomstick in half, I would NEVER stick my hand where I couldn’t see it. Plus, hello, Moray Eels?

Well rats. I got side-tracked on Chittenango and used up a lot of my space before I got around to telling you about Bobby catching the biggest Brown Trout I’d ever seen. Next week, I guess.